They would just keep the failed drives in the chassi. Maybe swap out the entire chassi if enough drives died.
Side: Thanks for sharing about the "bathtub curve", as TIL and I'm surprised I haven't heard of this before especially as it's related to reliability engineering (as from searching on HN (Algolia) that no HN post about the bathtub curve crossed 9 points).
And then, there is of course radiation trouble.
So those two kinds of burn-in require a launch ti space anyway.
Programming and CS people somehow rarely look at that.
Redundancy is a small issue on Earth, but completely changes the calculations for space because you need more of everything, which makes the already-unfavourable space and mass requirements even less plausible.
Without backup cooling and power one small failure could take the entire facility offline.
And active cooling - which is a given at these power densities - requires complex pumps and plumbing which have to survive a launch.
The whole idea is bonkers.
IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
I have no idea if that's any more economic, but at least it solves the most obvious redundancy and deployment issues.
The analysis is a third party analysis that among other things presumes they'll launch unmodified Nvidia racks, which would make no sense. It might be this means Starcloud are bonkers, but it might also mean the analysis is based on flawed assumptions about what they're planning to do. Or a bit of both.
> IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.
This would get you significantly less redundancy other than against physical strikes than having the same redundancy in a single unit and letting you control what feeds what, the same way we have smart, redundant power supplies and cooling in every data center (and in the racks they're talking about using as the basis).
If power and cooling die faster than the servers, you'd either need to overprovision or shut down servers to compensate, but it's certainly not all or nothing.
the more satellites you put up there, the more it happens, and the greater the risk that the immediate orbital zone around Earth devolves into an impenetrable whirlwind of space trash, aka Kessler Syndrome.
on one hand, I imagine you'd rack things up so the whole rack/etc moves as one into space, OTOH there's still movement and things "shaking loose" plus the vibration, acceleration of the flight and loss of gravity...
Perhaps the server would be immersed in a thermally conductive resin to avoid parts shaking loose? If the thermals are taken care of by fixed heat pipes and external radiators - non thermally conductive resins could be used.
And at sufficient scale, once you plan for that it means you can massively simplify the servers. The amount of waste a sever case suitable for hot-swapping drives adds if you're not actually going to use the capability is massive.